Busting into the blogging scene is easy. All you do is show up, write a few words, and people will flock to you. No worries!
Wrong.
But that’s what so many bloggers think. And when people don’t show up, they get frustrated and quit.
People don’t show up because the net is overcrowded and listening to the same regurgitation over and over again gets old.
The big names of blogging, you know, Copyblogger, Chris Brogan, and Pat Flynn didn’t start off big. People didn’t know who they were in their early days.
They had to work their way to where they are. And it’s what you have to do if you want to rocket ship your blog into outer space.
The bad news is starting off as a success isn’t an option.
The good news is you can shorten your time as a rookie astronaut by boosting your blog power with these free tools.
1. Google Adwords Keyword Tool
Google Adwords Keyword Tool is massive starting point since blogging about what your audience is talking about is an absolute must if you want to rocket into the stratosphere.
It’s invaluable for coming up with post ideas and keywords that will help you rank quickly.
There are even new options now that will let you find out what keywords you could use for a particular link.
2. XMind
Once you have those amazing keywords from your Adword Tool, you’ll need to put together a stellar post.
XMind is a free mind mapping software that you’ll want to use to do just that.
It helps you take things out of a linear perspective, where most other people write from, and into a more visual and right-brained angle.
This will help you get more attention since you’re not regurgitating the same content everyone else is.
3. Google+ Account
As a blogger, you want access to the world. You’ll need to pin people down for interviews or conduct classes online that will make readers drool over your prowess.
Hangouts is an amazing way to do that. You can record sessions and hold them captive if they have really juicy content and trade it off for emails. Genius.
Connect with me here:
4. WordPress
I know, I know.
You’ve heard it a million times, but you’d be surprised how many people are still blogging from Blogger, Tumblr, or SquareSpace.
WordPress cannot be beaten when it comes to blogging because you will own your own content.
If blogger goes under, so do your words.
Don’t let someone else own your work.
5. WordPress SEO by Yoast
This superior and free SEO toolkit will help you focus on tightening your content keyword wattage so you don’t have to worry about your keyword percentages, whether or not you’ve covered your bases in putting your keywords in the right places, etc.
WordPress SEO by Yoast is a powerful tool in the hand of bloggers trying to rank faster.
6. Pixabay
Pixabay is, by the farthest reaches of the universe, the absolute best free image site out there.
Everything is free and it’s all top quality.
Beware. Once you get into Pixabay, you’ll have a hard time getting out.
7. LastPass
Don’t try to keep up with all your passwords. You have logins all over the net, just save yourself time and headache by letting LastPass do the storing for you.
One password is all you need to keep track of.
No more confusion or wasting time looking up passwords, having to reset them because you forget them.
Work smart.
8. Google Docs
If you’re trying to hit it big quickly, you’ll want to be able to work effortlessly and efficiently with other bloggers out there.
With Google Docs, there’s no more emailing documents back and forth.
Others can leave you notes, make changes, and more with this powerful time saver.
9. Social Sharing Toolkit
You cannot blog without social sharing buttons to help people help you by spreading the word about your massive content.
I use “Genesis Optimized Social Share” plugin, specially crafted for Genesis Framework..
10. Hootsuite
Once you’ve spent all that time creating those moving words for your readers, you have to make sure to promote your own goodies.
Are you going to periodically drop by your own site and click the “tweet” or “share” buttons? I hope not.
Hootsuite will let you schedule your posts ahead of time, so you can set up each post to automatically go out once every 4 hours across each of your networks and you’ll be able to move on to the next piece of content you need to create.
Take this knowledge and go forth to explode your blogging career into the stars using these 10 free tools.
I use the Pro version of Hootsuite, definitely worth the 9,99$/month.
What do you think?
Do you have any other tools to add and to suggest?
Please let me have your thoughts in the comments below, thanks!
Hey Erik,
I enjoyed reading this list of ten free tools to power a blog.
I’m happy that you introduce me to LastPass. I’m hearing about it from you for the first time.
I will try it out and see how it works.
Take care and have a nice day ahead.
-Oloyede Jamiu
Pixabay has become a lifesaver for me because sometimes you don’t want to spend money on the same old boring stock photos you see everywhere. I also like Morguefile and Unsplash. Unsplash has no search so you really can get lost there forever but there is some really beautiful photography. I vote for anything that saves time and money 🙂
Never heard of XMind and Pixabay.
Thank you Erik!!!
Hi Erik,
Amazing tools you have discussed here.
I am using and experiencing good with all these tools except “Xmind”, “Pixabay” and “LastPass”.
Lastpass is looking like amazing tool and we all must use it for security purpose. I would look forward to have it soon.
Thanks you so much for introducing these great tools with us. Have an awesome weekend ahead!
Great share Erik. Pixaby seems to be becoming very popular. I was looking for something more than the regular old stock photos and then I ran upon this from a suggestion of another blogger. I must say I absolutely love it.
All of your tips here are so awesome and some of them I was not even aware of. I had not heard of LastPass and I have for some reason been putting off HootSuite but it keeps coming back to me as a reminder so that tells me I need to add it to my arsenal of blogging tools.
Thanks for the wonderful tips Erik. Have a great rest of your week.
Hi Erik,
Good to ne here again
Very useful tools for the bloggers. I recently came to know about. WordPress SEO by Yoast and i am now using this its showing an amazing results. The green button at the side will appear when we upload the content page.
hey Erik #7 tool the lastPass the link is not showing, pl provide the link
Thanks a lot for this valuable free tools. I am sure your effort will appreciate by many bloggers here .
May you have a great day
~ Philip
Hi Erik,
Xmind was new to me. Gonna check it out for sure. Google docs saves a lot of time for me, it is the nice editor I have ever had.
For images, I had heard of it, never tried. Will check it out too. Thanks buddy.
Keep up the great work.
Hi Erik,
How you doing ?
Great work !!! Cameo know tools that are actually free, but the last one hoot suite comes with a normal and pro version ?. Only in pro version ( 9.99 per month ) you can get options of automation of tweets ?
Ps let me know
Thanks you very much or your help in need !!!
Siva
Hi Erik,
By this post i learned two things one is Xmind, and second one one is lastpass, these two tools are very useful for bloggers, thank you for sharing these important free blog tools.
I couldn’t understand Xmind!! Can you explain more??
Heard for the first time.
Moreover Facebook is also great tool to increase blogging power by content marketing.
I think you should give it a special mention.
Awesome. This is what I am looking for. Great article and thanks for the info.
Great tips. now i know how thanks to you 🙂 thanks for sharing
Great tips, just about hootsuit, I am always bit confused because if we put scheduling and that become blunder by any way social media sites can mark your site spam 😛 so for natural clicks I think manual sharing works great. In manual way, we can’t increase social signals.
nice sharing.
i’m just using adword and write seo article
i’m newbie on seo 🙁
Hi Erik …thanks for the info this really helps. I am new to blogging and want to get my voice out there, just needed to find my niche. So I am looking forward to using this tools you gave us. Question: do you happen to know how we can leave a signature when commenting on others blogs?? I dont know how to do that. Thanks
Nice list. I saw new tools from your list. Till now I was using only google keyword tool, google+, wordpress yoast, wordpress etc. I think I should give a try to some other tools too. I also have another list of great tools which I will share here later as I forgot the location of that file 😉 .
Thanks for reminding about these tools.
thanks a lot Erik,
was really helpful for me in building my blogs,especially in niches like tech or blogging it is very essential to use such useful tools